The Corporadelic Set and Setting

The Quandaries of Psychedelic Commodification

“Commodification” may be defined as the pervasive process through which a resource, activity, idea, or relationship is turned into a commodity to be traded on the market. Through this process, an object that had specific individual use value assumes a new type of value, based on its exchange value relative to other commodities, so that, as the process advances there remains “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest.”¹¹ Corporatization is the process in which state assets are transformed into corporations and can more broadly be defined as the installation of corporate logics into various domains of the economy and society.¹² Following these definitions, the commodification of psychedelics is the process through which psychedelic compounds, the experiences related to them, and the relationships surrounding them become a commodity and part of a broader marketplace. The corporatization of psychedelics is the insertion of corporate logics into the relationships and dynamics governing psychedelics and their use.

Misgivings about the commodification of psychedelics commonly rest on the notion that psychedelics belong in a noncommoditized, noncorporatized order. While a black market economy has long existed around psychedelics, criticisms of psychedelic capitalism refer back (at least implicitly) to decades and centuries of communal use, in which these compounds and the cultures surrounding them were relatively exempt from the intense attention of corporations and the dynamics of the commercial world.

Psychedelics have long been a legacy of global Indigenous communities, which consecrated them, deified them, and employed them for sorcery, warfare, and healing, embedding them in rich cultural tapestries.¹³ They were, additionally, regarded as a symbol of the 1960s counterculture, a counterculture which revolted against the values of consumerism and purported to offer a psychedelically inspired vision of a bettered world orienting itself towards values of equity, non-hierarchy and anti-consumerism.¹⁴ Over the second half of the twentieth century, in which psychedelics were a subcultural underground niche, psychedelic advocates held on to an ethos of sharing that can be recognized in varied instances: the ideals of cheap (sometimes free), high-quality acid for the people championed by underground chemists and dealers of the 1960s, including Owsley Stanley, Nick Sand, and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love;¹⁵ the prospering bootleg scene that emerged around (and was condoned by) the quintessential psychedelic band, the Grateful Dead;¹⁶ and the open-source psychedelic cookbooks freely released to the world by underground chemist Alexander Shulgin with the aim of preserving and disseminating knowledge about novel psychedelic compounds.¹⁷

Black-market psychedelia was never entirely divorced from capitalist modes of production and distribution. Jarnow’s Heads provides a rich description of what he calls hip economics, for instance. Nevertheless, the resurgence of psychedelic research and growing cultural acceptance of these agents in the second decade of the twenty-first century opened up new avenues for commodification (e.g., aggressive advertisement, market integration, and extractive data collection). This happened over a wide range of arenas, from ayahuasca tourism to retreat centers and psychedelic integration coaches.¹⁸ Yet the one arena in which the effect of capital has been most marked is the medicalization and regulation of psychedelics.

Since the 2010s, psychedelics have been promoted as harbingers of a mental health revolution and touted as cure-all panaceas for anything from trauma and major depression to pain and eating disorders. They soon became the focus of a billion-dollar “psychedelic industrial complex”¹⁹ involving Silicon Valley moguls and involved in grueling patent wars and attempts at monopolization.²⁰ Following the pharmacologist logic guiding the pharmaceutical industry—where drug effect is assumed to exist irrespective of context—mainstream discussion has paid little heed to the profound context dependency of psychedelics and its implications.²¹ In other words, it has ignored the fact that rather than being immutable, psychedelics and their effects change in ways that reflect their surrounding culture.

The consequences of the corporadelic (corporate-manifesting) set and setting may be profound. The changing frameworks surrounding psychedelics intervene in social dynamics of psychedelic space as well as in how psychedelic experiences are understood and experienced. While it is impossible in the scope of this commentary to produce a comprehensive analysis of the potential effects of the corporadelic set and setting, using this concept highlights multiple ways this emerging landscape may shape the reception of psychedelics into medicine and the outcomes of psychedelic therapy.

The new corporadelic set and setting changes the intragroup dynamics from a community code of open sharing to psychedelic turf wars and intrigues. As companies battle it out over who will corner the market created by the psychedelic gold rush, the effect is felt down to the level of activists. Community organizing is suffering from encroachment of capital interests replacing altruist idealism with blunt self-interest. Pinni Baumol, an Israeli psychedelic activist, organizer of several local conferences on psychedelics, and member of the government Drug Committee Research Team for Raves and Harm Reduction, told me: “A few years ago, it was about working and collaborating to promote and enable the existence of this beautiful thing. But then, once financial stakes enter the picture, the communal approach starts appearing naïve. Why should I voluntarily organize a community conference about psychedelics, when some big company like Psytech or Microdose are paying some random event organizer thousands of dollars to do the same job.”²² The dramatic transformation of the character of psychedelic conference from communal to commercial, and corporate-dominated has led to much discussion, including the publication of guidelines for the “ethical sponsorship and transparency psychedelic conferences” and debates regarding these guidelines and their implementation by actors.²³

The corporadelic set and setting paints the experience of individuals in various ways. Tehseen Noorani points to a structurally lurking danger of a race to the bottom affecting standards of care in capital-based medicalization.²⁴ Within the context of shareholder capitalism, companies are incentivized to increase profits by lowering costs, which habitually means lowering standards of care. There has been evidence of that occurring within the booming ketamine clinic industry.²⁵ In one widely publicized case, users of a ketamine telemedicine company were made to pay exorbitant sums for remotely assisted (and in some cases “self-guided”) sessions with ketamine. They encountered lack of therapeutic support, long wait times, and low levels of therapeutic consistency, which led to strikingly countertherapeutic experiences of frustration, anger, anxiety, and worry.²⁶

In cases like this, we can find clues to the subtle ways the meaning and potential of a psychedelic experience change when it is embedded in the new cultural set and setting of corporadelia. Over millennia psychedelics have been treated with a diversity of approaches. They have been approached with religious devotion,²⁷ respected and feared as powerful plant allies,²⁸ and imbued with ethereal entities holding supreme powers of healing and harming.²⁹ In other, mid-twentieth-century instances, they have been idolized as harbingers of a new consciousness culture and a utopian society.³⁰ Capitalism has sought to replace Indigenous and countercultural myth with commercial hype. Psychedelics were to be transformed into pharmaceutical medicines, with antediluvian countercultural beliefs in cooperation, community and the lofty cosmic role of psychedelics giving way to the logic of capitalist competition, market domination, and expansion.

Ultimately, the prospect of corporadelic psychedelic medicine cannot help but be self-defeating as a strategy for treatment. While marketing schemes may sell the drugs in terms of their medicinal utility, such tricks tend to outlive their efficacy. The meaning (placebo) response of new drugs is demonstrated to wane with the years, and their efficacy is reduced.³¹ For psychedelics, as drugs whose effects depend decisively on expectancy and context, this is crucial.³² A corporadelic landscape, which reflects and maps onto corporate norms of competitiveness, manipulation, and greed, cannot be conducive for the profound states of ego-dissolving healing it purports to produce. As the context of psychedelic voyaging migrates into the symbolic network of late-stage capitalism, its liberatory, healing potential is crucially thwarted.

Corporate capitalism works by invading and trying to gain domination over lands and communities.³³ Psychedelic capitalism, which supports the vision of medicalization, sidelines other sociopsychedelic imaginaries,³⁴ such as those of decriminalization and legalization or those emerging from Indigenous epistemologies.³⁵ This happens in direct and indirect ways. In one case of direct action, corporate actors lobbied against a relaxation of drug laws that could potentially threaten their profit model.³⁶ In other cases, the move is more subtle and includes the attempt to gain cultural and regulatory supremacy that institutes dominance over alternative sociopsychedelic visions. Plesa and Petranker highlight the dominant role of neoliberal values of individualism, productivity, self-improvement, resilience, and responsibilization in the newly appearing market-driven psychedelic ecosystem.³⁷ With its focus on market-driven, patent-controlled, pharma-based individualized health care solutions, corporadelia obscures the potential of healing that arrives through “genuine care, presence, respect, and being part of a healing community.”³⁸ A medicalized worldview that markets psychedelics as decontextualized pharmaceutical commodities actively devalues nonscientific epistemologies that bestow extramedical meaning and potency to psychedelic compounds and experiences.³⁹ “How we talk about these medicines impacts how they can affect us and how well they can be studied,” Devenot, Conner, and Doyle remind us.⁴⁰ For instance, an emphasis on set and setting in psychedelic medicine may lead to a worldview that views psychedelics as one component within many (such as community or intimacy) that enable psychedelic restorative effects and should therefore be sought, whereas corporadelic accounts often put the emphasis on disempowering pharmacologist narratives that focus on a patented chemical as the source of healing.⁴¹ A redefinition of the psychedelic compounds in corporadelic terms is therefore an exercise in ontological politics that redefines the meaning and potential of these agents,⁴² and is part of a legacy of linguistic politics that has long sought to define and determine the meaning of hallucinogens using words and metaphors.⁴³ Hauskeller et al. describe psychedelic science as operating on “new frontiers of colonization, where the methods of clinical medical science are applied to absorb private refuges of unreason, pleasures, and communal experiences into the marketized systems of control and behavior management.”⁴⁴ By acting in these ways, it subverts the very possibility for healing it purports to carry and threatens to subsume the many varieties of psychedelic experiences in one dominant epistemology.

Bruce Alexander’s Globalization of Addiction provides a powerful account of how social structures promoted by free market society enabled the rise of addiction in society, a pattern that is also observed by drug historian David Courtwright.⁴⁵ Critics of psychedelic capitalism have similarly pointed out the structural contradiction between the context and the proclaimed purposes of psychedelic medicalization. As Gearin and Devenot write, “Psychedelic medicine is being constructed within neoliberalism as a means of furthering neoliberal priorities, in a manner that risks exacerbating the very problems that some claim it solves.”⁴⁶ In other words, corporate-produced psychedelic medicine is proposed as a cure for existential maladies of depression, addiction, and trauma that are exacerbated by the very exploitative system that markets these new forms of corporate-mediated psychedelia.

The aspirations of corporate psychedelia are infinite. It seeks to become the vanguard for a brave new era in mental health and dominate the conversation and regulation around psychedelics. Through digital data-gathering apps and devices, it seeks to control how the psychedelic experience is mediated to consumers worldwide.⁴⁷ Yet a triumph for corporadelia may signal a grave loss to the inestimably richer social, cultural, and spiritual potentials these agents are able to call forth and support.